My only wish is it’s lack of an exporter to Octane/ Reality. I’m wondering if one of Fenrics plugins would export full animation, and mesh, to Octane?

As a Carrara and Octane user, I can tell you it's not as easy as that,. and it's probably not possible for many carrara scenes.
(IMO) It would be better to have Octane as a plug-in renderer, which could work within Carrara,.. (not sure if that's possible either)

Octane uses your Video card's GPU and RAM to load all of the models,. and all of the textures for those models.
This means that you're restricted to loading and rendering what the graphics card RAM can handle.

If you imagine a Carrara scene with some replicated grass, and some trees,. then think about the size of the resulting exported OBJ with hundreds or thousands of models,. plus all their texture maps,.. then you can easily get scenes which will take a long time to process and export from Carrara as a single OBJ file,. but may also result in an OBJ file which is larger than your available GPU ram.

I'm not saying that Octane is bad, or faulty in any way,.. I think it's a great renderer,. but your Video card's RAM limitation is one of the major drawbacks to using these new breed of unbiased GPU powered renderers.

Most 3D programs still use your CPU and RAM,. and you'll occasionally still get into situations where things start to slow down due to memory and processing power,. but it's much easier to create a scene which uses a few GB or ram, and still allows you to have thousands of figures or trees, or grass etc... and have them animated if you want,. all within Carrara.

If you're rendering for animation,. then the difference between a Carrara rendered sequence,. and an Octane rendered sequence becomes less visible when you're seeing 24 frames per second.

As far as the "Quality" of the rendered image,.. depending on your skill levels in creating and using shaders and lighting,. Carrara can produce images which are just as good as Octane,. and without the hassle of exporting and adjusting the shaders and lighting in Octane to look (almost) the same as your Carrara scene.

As for animation,. each frame would need to be a separate OBJ model.
that's why you're seeing very simplistic animations where the figure is repeating a 15 to 30 frame looped cycle

So,. the bottom line for me right now is that Octane can be used to render a high quality image of a static object.
Carrara can be used to produce a high quality image, or image sequence,.. of either static or animated objects and figures.

Octane has some great "cool" features and tools, and the material / shader creation and on-line sharing through a central database is a great idea,.. but the cool tools and almost instant feedback to adjustments in the scene are all reliant on your graphics card and GPU ram.

You can still create a much larger scene, with more objects and more detail in carrara, and render at High quality,. even on an older system with Win XP and a couple of GB of ram.

Graphics cards will obviously improve and get cheaper, but for something with several GB of ram and thousands of Cuda cores. .. It'll cost you.

Learn Carrara, it's got a fantastic render engine which blows the pants off of most other 3D programs, it's also fast, and has multi-pass options which can also help you get better images in post production.

Octane (stand alone) version 1 was only recently released, and while there's a lot of great features right now,.(octane now supports object instancing and placement, and Groups of objects) it'll get better with time,. and the price of Graphics cards with Multiple Gigabytes of high speed RAM and thousands of CUDA cores will continue to become more affordable,..

I'm not really hip to any of this, since I'm just a happy little Carrara guy. I love Carrara's rendering capabilities.
However, onto your query:
Koukotsu, from over in the "Post your Renders" thread, has introduced a tutorial in the old forums about exporting Carrara stuff to Blender for use in Luxology(?) or whatever. I asked her if she still had the files, since their all missing now from the old forums, and she said that she might be making a new one - as all of those files are now lost. I would imagine that such a thing would be a great start? I'm ignorant to such things, but thought I'd offer that, since it's fresh in my brain-pan. :coolhmm:

does octane do FBX import?
and I have gotten Carrara rigged figures animated into Blender using collada but not Daz/Poser ones except as an animated mangled mess.
not that I know much what to do with them once in there!
have also gotten stuff into the free version of Houdini Apprentice.

3dtoday,
I can't speak for everyone, but I'm just a nice little guy - until someone changes my mind in that regard! lol
I know a few people around here, though, that seem to be incapable of being nice... or friendly... even when they try. It's sad - so I feel sorry for them rather than take offense. I almost got mad when they picked on one of my good Carrarartist friends, but she asked before I had a chance to be, not to - so I didn't let it show - even though I'd still like to meet up with both of them in a dark alley - in real life... just me and them - all at once! :vampire:

Well CASUAL, is the nicest person in the Daz Universe , imho. He's created dozens of Free Daz scripts! He deserves
respect, and thanks, from everyone here if he arrives, please.!

Well CASUAL, is the nicest person in the Daz Universe , imho. He's created dozens of Free Daz scripts! He deserves
respect, and thanks, from everyone here if he arrives, please.!

Absolutely. I'll be very nice. I have a huge respect for people like that, especially. Always giving, and giving, and giving....
3DAGE is like that here. Infinite wisdom, friendly and always helpful, going out of his way, at times, to help folks resolve their issues!
[edited]

darn forum keeps losing my replies!
so now I have to retype this all again!!

I was hoping fenrics objs exporter could export sequenced obj files to use in casuals script for creating morh targets in sequence
trees with rustle and ocean primitives work as obj exports along timeline but not in fenrics exporter, you use the subsequent ones to create morph targets in morph loader (some of Howies trees won't work as I queried in another thread)
and you can use this not just in DS
but another GPU base software suite I am beta testing tbat indeed does realtime render
(but hush, cannot tell yet)
it could work in Blender using cycles too if it were possibe to export sequenced objs of everything with morph and skinning deforms (huge obj scene files needed for each frame but doable)

Tugpsx has been working on a free plugin for Octane Render (not the paid for plugin being worked on by Otoy) for DAZ Studio and he said once that he was hoping to make one for Carrara after he released the one for DAZ Studio, but I don't believe it's out yet. He had run into snags when DAZ released Studio 4.5. Octane does not support FBX yet. There were more requests for Collada when they first brought it up in the Octane forum so they decided to pursue Collada import, though it's not in yet. I think OBJ is still the main way to get anything into Octane. RIB import was one of their goals that also fell by the wayside. Octane doesn't do object motion blur yet. That's a problem for Cycles, too, apparently, from the clips you posted. That's a must for animation IMHO.

as far as FBX and Collada are concerned,. there are revision issues with the different version of FBX, fortunately there's a conversion utility available on Autodesk.com to change one FBX version to another,. so with a bit of fluffing around, you can usually get your FBX to load.

Collada is actually more open source,. EG : Daz-Collada ,. which was created as a file transfer from DS to Carrara, and vice-versa.

That was so successful that it's now been scrapped and replaced with a totally new DAZ format,. Daz User Files (DUF) .. I know,. it's not a great format name,. but it works and can transfer entire scenes, material presets, animations, or a pose from DS 4.5 to Carrara 8.5.

Octane also automatically loads all the textures for the OBJ, (which is something that not all programs are capable of),.
However,. because the shader and render engine in octane is different,. you'll need to / want to,.. adjust some shaders to take advantage of what octane does,

I played with the DS plugin which Tugpsx is working on a while ago.
it worked, but I found it a little clunky, but it's a beta, so clunky is normal. ..pointy is it worked as expected.

I think at that time there were also still issues with the way octane handled the mesh smoothing,. the Octane 1.10 seems much better., and the new lighting and post effects are great,.

Mec4D has done some great images with the DS2Octane plugin, but I think that's down to her skill and talent as an artist.
She does amazing renders in Carrara as well.

I think It's an important point to note here,. Buying a plugin, or a different render engine, won't instantly make you any better as an artist.

The output from Carrara's render engine can be just as good as that from Reality or Octane in the right hands.
One big change I'd like to see in Carrara is the use of the GPU to preview shaders and possibly assisting in some rendering operations.

as far as speed of rendering,. Carrara is still the fastest to a good final image,. when compared to Octane or Reality.
and there's no need to create massive files to export sequential OBJ

One other item to look at is the new Element 3D plugin for After effects.
It loads in a OBJ , or sequenced OBJ directly into After effects.

I bought it recently and it's great for compositing 3D animated into 2D .

Boy,
I'm really lucky to be blissfully pleased with having nothing but Carrara and my content, aren't I?
It's headaches like these that drove my ambition into finding Carrara in the first place. I really had some blinders on, though because I knew that I'd never find anything like that. When I ran across a live person at random playing with Carrara 5 on a laptop - I couldn't believe it. I bought it in 2007, I believe, and I've been utterly pleased ever since - and I love how it renders! Well, and everything else about it too!

Before you nail me with flying, rotten eggs... oh I hope you guys have a really bad aim...
Just please understand that I do realize your imposition and I'm not trying to make light of it... just making conversation. I totally see, first hand, many of the quirks and aggravating hiccups that can be found in Carrara. I just adjust my own habits around that - and Carrara is happy as the tail of a cat to help me do that. There are so many ways to overcome obstacles with this, incredible pile of digital bliss!

it was a beta release on the Octane user forums,. Still in development as far as I know.

well there seems to be a groundswell on this board for some Carrara updating, yes

Yes, we all want some elements of Carrara updated to work faster and better, but the renderer is the most updated part of Carrara, it's has serious lighting improvements in the last few versions which in some older scenes can make it slightly slower,.. but more accurate. but in many scenes makes it faster and more accurate.

There are other areas of Carrara which have not had any changes or improvements,.. and are starting to look their age.
there are also issues like Bullet which is still in development to integrate it fully with Carrara.

I think many Carrara users would like to see full multi-thread support for the NPR renderer added, and 32bit output,

Ok , although 2 GPU cards in tandem can go pretty darn fast!

generally that doesn't work for GPU rendering,. but does work for Game-play.

VRAM isn't shared between multiple graphics cards,. so if you have two 1GB cards,. you can't use 2GB for a scene, the maximum ram available would be 1GB

Octane suggests that you use one card for the display and the second card for the rendering

If you're really interested, there are demo version of Octane, and the plugins for Max Maya and Poser available to download from the Otoy (Octane) web site.

Then you can see how it performs with your system.

All of the Octane "plug-ins" are relatively new, and Octane itself has only just stepped out of it's beta phase, and into full version release with Octane 1. so, given some time and further development, it's possible to have plugins for Daz Studio and Carrara or any other 3D software.

Everyone who has been using Octane since it's initial beta release, has been able to load and render OBJ's without using a plugin.

If you're really interested, there are demo version of Octane, and the plugins for Max Maya and Poser available to download from the Otoy (Octane) web site.

Then you can see how it performs with your system.

All of the Octane "plug-ins" are relatively new, and Octane itself has only just stepped out of it's beta phase, and into full version release with Octane 1. so, given some time and further development, it's possible to have plugins for Daz Studio and Carrara or any other 3D software.

Everyone who has been using Octane since it's initial beta release, has been able to load and render OBJ's without using a plugin.

No not everyone. Not the people who got banned from the forum for small infringements, and then could not get software updates.

3DAGE said
Everyone who has been using Octane since it's initial beta release, has been able to load and render OBJ's without using a plugin.

thanks.

Is the animation workflow fast? How about the speed?

The problem I'm having with the Carrara renderer, is it's painfully slow. I'm guestimating much slower than Blender cycles, { which
is slow, too.

Actually, the speed of Carrara's renderer is something that most people who try Carrara are surprised about. I haven't tried Blender Cycles, so I can make no comparisons to that. Maybe if you explain what features you're using that make it seem slow, we can offer tips on optimizing that can speed it up.

Feel free to disagree, but I've seen renders done with the GPU renderers and I can usually tell. They may be faster, but there are some things they just can't do well yet. They will improve over time, and to the point where you truly can't tell, but they're not there yet, IMHO. I see no need to hurry and integrate a GPU renderer in Carrara. There are far more vital updates that need the development resources.

That being said, Fenric said the API prevents plugin developers from touching the render system or something to that effect. It would be nice if DAZ could open that up to allow for 3rd party plugins.

I was using lower settings during scene setup. But the results look like a game { not realistic } . so I upped the settings. The speed
im getting is unacceptable for animation. I might be ok with it if the results were better, but they still look like a game.

Well, I'm not getting in a quote tit-for-tat so I'll edit to the relevant point.

With an animation, you never want to use full GI. Not even the major studios do that because (as you've discovered) it takes too long. They simulate it. You also lose some control when you rely strictly on some mathematical algorithm to do the lighting.

Your best bet to get the renders you want isn't the renderer. Arguably it's the shading and the lighting. Learn how to do those and you'll open up a whole range of creative and speedy opportunities no matter what renderer you use.